[1] https://jalopnik.com/every-car-looks-like-this-thanks-to-a-g...
If people don't consider their personal footprint before taking purchase decisions, maybe they will take into consideration that they are being targeted by a growing group of people.
They will never do that. NEVER. It has become a perennial joke at this point in Germany with climate activists who block streets only to afterwards rack up 20k miles of air travel in half a year. The explanation? "The problem is systemic, individual actions don't matter".
Nobody considers their contribution relevant, because in total theirs will be dwarfed by everyone else's. That's just human nature. If the most-involved activists don't, how can you expect random people to?
I don't know about your anecdotal joke about some German activists flying 20k miles in half a year, but it's also a fact that flygskam is growing, that people who can afford it reportedly take a train even when it's slower, and that airlines are looking into carbon offsets. Another anecdote, my local XR group has a car pooling mailing list to make sure they attend all demonstrations in a convenient, low-carbon manner.
The math is simple, every liter of fuel kept in the ground will slow down global warming. There is no "threshold" that we will reach at which point all humanity is doomed.
They are hypocrites who make life hard for others by preaching water and drinking heavily wine, as it were.
I am also sure you understand that seeing some hypocrites preaching water while drinking wine should not stop you from reducing your alcohol intake, as you know it's unhealthy regardless.
There are giant gaps between what humans a) believe to be true, b) do individually and c) say they believe and do. You can get people to say that they believe some action is necessary, but it's rare to see actual meaningful action that actually impacts them (it's easy to say "I'm fine with outlawing meat" if you don't like meat for example, it's very different if you happen to enjoy meat).
My point is that it's unreasonable to expect average people to take "the big picture" into account for individual decisions (e.g. buying car, or taking a vacation away from home, or having children, or changing their diet), and all you can expect from doing so is disappointment over how uncommitted people are.
Well then it's ok if I pollute as well, since I'm doing it only as a private person and not in my quality as an activist!
It looks like the classic NPC-illusion where people think that yes, everybody should totally do whatever is right, but it shouldn't apply to themselves, because they are the player, not just another NPC. They tend to forget that they're NPCs to everyone else.
But I ascribe most of it to them being young. I'm sure if I had been more politically aligned with the mainstream when I was 20, I would've been insufferable as well.
However, I do agree there are far more limited uses cases for an SUV in a dense city.